Saturday, May 31, 2014

“Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!” was the rallying cry of
the French Revolution. As it turned,
Equality won out as the preeminent virtue of the three. Therefore, French
society needed to be leveled. Leveling was
accomplished by severing heads from the ruling elites.

Whenever the word “equality’ crops up in public policy
discussion, you know that a political solution is about to be imposed. And when political solutions are imposed,
someone takes a haircut while someone else reaps ill gotten gains.

Consider for a moment, the recent dust up over gender wage
inequality. Economists such as Thomas Sowell and Walter
Williams debunk this canard through rigorous analysis. The do this by adjusting for the facts that
many women opt for less time consuming professions such as teaching or nursing
that afford them the flexibility to spend time raising their families. They also adjust for the fact that many
women voluntarily step off of the corporate ladder for extended stretches in
order have children and raise families.
They go on to note that when these variables are accounted for, there is
negligible difference in the earnings of men and women of comparable
qualifications.

Government attempts to impose “equality” would simply
interfere with the lifestyle and career choices that women voluntarily elected
while burdening employers with endless paperwork to justify their pay
structure.

Sowell performs the same analysis for reported race based
differences in earnings. When all
other factors are solved for, Blacks and Whites with comparable qualifications
earn comparable money. The factors that
drive the overall shortfall in African American incomes include the dangerous
zip code monopoly schools that they are forced to attend, the war on drugs
which disproportionately jails young Black men, minimum wage laws that prevent
them from taking their first step on their career path and a welfare system that
rewards single parent families.

Government attempts to impose to impose wage equality
ignores the true reasons the income disparity which is State created.

Thus it totally baffles me that many who profess to be
libertarian support marriage equality. Libertarians from Rand to Rothbard and from
Bergland to Boaz agree that the State has no business in regulating relations
between consenting adults. That is the philosophically
consistent libertarian stance.

Marriage equality,
however, is a political imposition, a statist contrivance. Ayn Rand tell us that the statist is a person
“who believes that some men have the right to
force, coerce, enslave, rob, and murder others.”

In this instance the people
who will suffer are those of various religious convictions who elect not to
endorse same sex marriage. By using the full
force of the courts and the endless array of anti-discrimination statutes these
dissenters are forced into acquiescence with practices that they find
objectionable.

It is true that a great many
libertarians are secularists who may have little sympathy for those who they
might dismiss as religious bigots. To
this there are two responses. The first
is Martin Niemoller’s chilling epitaph:

First
they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then
they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then
they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.

Then
they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.

The
point being is that for each of us, the day may come when the State will force
us to kowtow to that which we find odious.
That is why we stand in unison with others with whom we disagree.

The
other reason is that is essential that libertarians stand on principle. Principle is what sets us apart from and
above the political riff-raff. Republicans,
Democrats, neo-cons and liberals worship at the altar of expediency. They think nothing of using any means to
attain the ends that they desire. Think
of George W. Bush saying that he "abandoned free-market principles to
save the free-market system".
WTF?

So, would
we stand in the way of same sex couples pursuing happiness as they see fit? Not at all.

Marriage
needs to be depoliticized by removing it from State oversight. Whenever anything of value is brought into
the political realm it becomes the object of strife and acrimony.

Civil
marriage is rightly the subject of contract law between two (or more)
consenting parties. Religious marriage
is a matter of personal choice for the participants. There is no place for State involvement in
church services.

Classical
liberal doctrine separated church and state, protecting religious expression
from State interference. The evolved libertarian
also separates:

Commerce from State

Education from State

Banking from State

Money from State

Healthcare from State

Energy from State

Agriculture from State

Technology from State

Transportation from State

Art from State

The Environment from State

Charity from State

Telecommunications from State

Internet from State

Infrastructure from State

Personal defense from State

Likewise,
now is the time to divorce marriage from state.
Ultimately, all of the above can summed up in just two lines:

Thursday, May 29, 2014

A message from my State Assemblyman, Troy Singleton, landed
in my inbox recently. The point of Mr.
Singleton’s missive was that our State should be more
judicious in its manner of granting tax exemptions to selected businesses. Who
could object to greater discernment and deliberation on the part of our elected
officials?

Singleton touts his Economic Opportunity Act of 2013
that creates jobs by allowing “individuals or businesses to reduce their tax
liability if they meet certain criteria”. Therefore by the testimony of his own
legislation, Singleton recognizes that reduced taxes translate to more jobs and
greater prosperity in general. Most Jersey
politicians recognize this. That is why
we have Urban Enterprise Zones
in the state. Urban Enterprise Zones are
neighborhoods where the political class has granted tax relief to resuscitate
their moribund economies once the collectivists have plundered, raped, pillaged
and left them for dead.

The obvious question is, if everyone accepts that tax relief
makes life better, why not relieve us of taxes altogether? No one has ever argued that more income
extracted from honest businesses or individuals makes life better.

Singleton proposes that New Jersey taxpayers underwrite extensive
economic analysis to better determine which businesses are most deserving of special
tax privileges. Murray Rothbard, one of
the most astute economic thinkers of all time, points out that economists are
ill equipped for such a task. He writes:

“Contrary to the
pretensions of many economists, he is of little aid to the businessman. He
cannot forecast future consumer demands and future costs as well as the
businessman; if he could, then he would be the businessman. The entrepreneur is
where he is precisely because of his superior forecasting ability on the
market. The pretensions of econome-tricians and other “model-builders” that
they can precisely forecast the economy will always founder on the simple but
devastating query: “If you can forecast so well, why are you not doing so on
the stock market, where accurate forecasting reaps such rich rewards?”

Of course all economic analysis must be subject to interpretation. This job falls to silver tongued
lobbyists. You can bet that the firms
with the best lobbyists will also be the ones most deserving of tax breaks.

But what really gets my (1/4) Irish up is when my
Assemblyman starts throwing the term “tax expenditure”. What is a tax expenditure? It is simply any money that the government
lets you keep after they are finished taking their share.

For instance, let’s say that you spend the day digging
ditches for $100 and the government takes half of that. The $50 that you have left is a tax
expenditure that the government has made to allow to get enough food to eat and
a place to sleep so that you come back tomorrow and produce more tax revenue
for them. The underlying assumption
behind “tax expenditures” is that everything that you have is really government
property and that they are doing you a solid by allowing you to keep a bit for
yourself.

Here is an example. A
mild mannered kid goes to school each day only to have his lunch stolen by a
bully. After a while, the mild mannered
kid starts performing poorly in his studies because he is weak and hungry. The school is considering expelling him for
poor performance. Seeing this, the bully
realizes that his meal ticket may be going away. Therefore he now steals only half of the mild
mannered boy’s lunch so that his victim can have enough sustenance to stay in
school. Thus the bully has made a “tax expenditure”
of a half of lunch per day in order to maintain the viability of income stream.

And that is the lie of tax expenditures. What is theirs is theirs. And what is yours is theirs as well.

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Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Here in
2014, few seem to remember that the Tea Party movement did not coalesce as
racist mob out to lynch Barack Obama.
Instead, it united in protest of what then candidate, Bob Barr, called
the BOMB, that Bush
Obama McCain Bailouts. The Tea Party
was launched to crusade on behalf of capitalism, free markets, fiscal responsibility
and monetary sanity, not on cultural or racial animus.

Not
long after the election of President Obama, another populist uprising emerged,
the Occupy Movement. This bunch was
younger, scruffier and less respectful of private property than the Tea
Partiers. Yet they had much in common.

Both
objected to the bailout of millionaires and billionaires who could not
competently manage their companies or their investment portfolios.

Like
all decent and compassionate people, both would like to see health care
provided to all deserving Americans. Of
course their solution differed. The Tea
Party opted for deregulation so as to unleash the power of free markets, drive prices
down and make quality care affordable for the masses. The Occupiers would opt for single
payer. Both would agree; however, that
the Affordable care Act is little more than a sop to Big Insurance, Big Pharma
and the AMA while giving free pass exemptions to favored corporations and labor
unions.

The Occupiers
and the Tea Party also joined hands in opposition to the Fed’s expansionist
monetary policy, particularly those of both camps who supported Ron Paul. Once again this is a policy that benefits
only the wealthiest of Americans while doing material harm to the average
citizen with a savings account or is living on a fixed income. Additionally, currency inflation has been
used by regimes throughout history to finance unpopular wars and obscure their
true cost.

We see
the same problems. We see that corporatism
and crony capitalism are at the heart of America’s material woes. We
differ as to the cure. This is why Daryl Brooks, Mark Falzon and I reached out
the Occupy Trenton in 2011 to try to bridge the gap.

Saturday, May 24, 2014

In this month’s Catholic Star Herald, the newspaper of the
Camden Diocese, Father Robert J. Gregorio writes an impassioned plea to neuter
Americans’ right to defend life, limb, liberty and property by repealing
the Second Amendment.

Unfortunately, Father, chose to begin his chain of reasoning
by invoking Germany’s decision to place speed limits on the autobahn for the
greater public good. In boxing, this is
called “leading with your chin”.

Father opens his article with the phrase, “Not that long ago
in Germany”. Ok, let’s talk about what
went down in Germany no so long ago. The
Nazi Party disarmed
its political opponents. They made
it felonious for any Jew to own firearms.
How did things work out for those disarmed Jews?

Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Communist China had one
other feature in common as well. All
three suppressed religion. Yes, to some
extent, they allowed the freedom to “worship”.
They allowed people to go into their church buildings to hold services
but they were forbidden to put their faith to work outside of the church walls. Sound familiar?

The left is at war with people of faith in America. This is most evidenced in the HHS mandates
and in civil rights actions against those who object to same sex marriage. Candidate Obama spoke volumes of the elite’s
contempt for devout, salt-of- the-earth Americans when he dismissed them as
rubes that cling their “guns or religion”.

On a local level our
police forces and
turning into paramilitary units by recycling the cast-off battlefield
weapons of our international wars. In
addition to this we know that our government is spying on as and the NDAA
authorizes it to indefinitely jail supposed enemies without warrant or recourse
to habeas corpus.

Like the cowards
that they are, government bullies the old and the weak. They sent in a small army to harass septuagenarian,
Cliven Bundy. They backed off only when
massed militia forces stood them down. The Feds are also picking on 70 year old
medical marijuana patient, Larry
Harvey in Washington State, looking to send him to prison. This is the same government that killed
innocent women and children in Waco and Ruby Ridge. Locally, in my home town, the police fire
bombed the local Black radical group, The Move, killing women and kids. Need I go on?

Lawless states, such the one that America is fast becoming,
cannot tolerate dissent. Religious minorities
are often the most truculent dissenters, and therefore bear the full brunt of State
suppression. However, God’s people need
not be trampled upon by Philistines.
Mosses, Joshua, Saul and David understood this. Judah Maccabee got it. Solomon did not and this led to destruction
of the kingdom.

Yes, gun ownership entails risk. Diving cars and flying planes entail risks
that kill thousands yearly. The foods
that we consume, the beverages that we drink and the drugs that we take each
entail risk and side effects. Free enterprise
implies the risk of failure and bankruptcy.
Freedom is risky but freedom is also glorious. Freedom empowers humans to be all that they
can be. Freedom is the only hope of
human kind ever lifting itself out of the mire poverty and destitution. We see that lesson repeated over and over
again in the Developing World.

Freedom requires a free people to be able to protect itself
from the usurpations of authoritarian regimes.
Freedom requires an armed and vigilant people. We cannot depend on government to protect our
liberty. Like the Stockholm Syndrome, that
is a dangerous delusion of placing trust in your captor.

Monday, May 19, 2014

Back when I was in Catholic school and I acted up, I could
expect a stiff whack from the hand of authority. Typically, the news of my comeuppance would
travel home with me. When my Dad got
home, he would ask, “Why did you make Sister have to hit you?” Upon hearing my story, he would administer a
second dose of Sister’s medicine.

The goal of Catholic education was to turn out saints. Apparently today’s kids are already saints and
do not require the same correction that I needed to be set on the straight and
narrow path. At least according to
Attorney General Eric Holder

Holder
spoke this weekend at the Morgan State commencement ceremonies where he
rehashed his latest shtick. The AG asserts that the disproportionate discipline
rates in public schools and incarceration rates of Black Males is proof positive
that racism lives. Let’s consider these
one at a time and then in tandem.

“Among the
biggest obstacles to educating children in many ghetto schools are disruptive
students whose antics, threats and violence can make education virtually
impossible. If only 10 percent of the students are this way, that sacrifices
the education of the other 90 percent.

The
idea that Eric Holder, or anybody else, can sit in Washington and determine how
many disciplinary actions against individual students are warranted or
unwarranted in schools across the length and breadth of this country would be
laughable if it were not so tragic.

Relying
on racial statistics tells you nothing, unless you believe that black male
students cannot possibly be more disruptive than Asian female students, or that
students in crime-ridden neighborhoods cannot possibly require disciplinary
actions more often than children in the most staid, middle-class neighborhoods.

Attorney
General Holder is not fool enough to believe either of those things. Why then
is he pursuing this numbers game?

The
most obvious answer is politics. Anything that promotes a sense of grievance
from charges of racial discrimination offers hope of energizing the black vote
to turn out to vote for Democrats, which is especially needed when support from
other voters is weakening in the wake of Obama administration scandals and fiascoes.”

Moving on to the second issue, let me begin by
acknowledging that incarceration rates are disproportionally high among African
American men. However, it would not be
too far off base to suggest that this in not so much a function of racism as
the lack of legal opportunities due to a failing economy coupled with the
unlimited upside of the drug market.

No risk, no reward. No hope, why not? The trap is set for young Black
men but not out of racism. They are
shackled by the stupidity of America’s heavy handed economic policies combined
with the senseless War on Drugs.
Obamacare and minimum wage increases will not set put these men on the
road to lawful prosperity.

But for arguments’ sake, let’s go along with
the premise racial bias is afoot here.
Who then would be the perpetrators?

To a great extent, Black male students attend
urban inner city schools. Inner city
schools are controlled predominantly by Democrats and by teachers unions who
are also Democrat.

How about the big city and Federal criminal
justice systems that are busing and jailing young Black men? They are also controlled by Democrats. Therefore it seems that Eric Holder is
calling racism on his own team. You go,
sir! Tell it like it is!

To get their base worked up, the Dems are
busting on their own people and then blaming it on the great racist in the sky

It seems that Harry
Browne was spot on in observing that,” “The
government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand
you a crutch and say, 'See if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be
able to walk.”

What we have here
with Mister Holder is government creating a problem that it will pretend to
solve.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Two ideas that libertarians hold
dear, free market capitalism and limited government have been poisoned by the flawed
legacies of two arch rivals in George Washington’s first cabinet, Thomas
Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

Alexander Hamilton may have been
the United States’ first big time political operative. Hamilton sought his fortune in the corridors
and the backrooms of power. He cozied up
to President Washington, the most powerful man in America and ingratiated
himself with the financial elites of New York and Philadelphia.

Hamilton used his office as
Treasurer to direct largesse to his powerful big city friends. One of his first initiatives was to pay of
the States’ War debts using Federal funds.

Many Revolutionary War veterans
were holding state war bonds that were virtually worthless. They saw no prospect of ever being paid. As Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton put
forward a plan whereby the Federal government would buy these state bonds at
full face value.

His plan had two moral
failings. The first was that he gave his
wealthy friends inside information on the plan so that they purchased the debt
from the poor vets at pennies on the dollar and then reaped a windfall when the
Feds paid them off in full. The second
was that that the Southern states had already paid their war debts. Therefore the Southerners wound up
shouldering a big chunk of the Northeast’s obligations. The first bail out.

Hamilton financed this boondoggle
for his cronies by putting an excise tax on the sale of whiskey. Hardscrabble backwoods farmers made whiskey
from their unsold grain as a means of preserving its utility rather than seeing
it rot. This sparked an uprising known
as the Whiskey Rebellion. Enraged local
farmers refused to pay this unfair tax.
President Washington dispatched over 12,000 troops to western
Pennsylvania, under the command of Hamilton, to suppress this uprising for the
benefit of his cronies.

Hamilton also successfully
established the first
American central bank which was both unconstitutional and a source of ready
money for the Eastern financiers. He
also advocated for a British style mercantile economy whereby politically
connected merchants would receive subsidies and grants of monopoly privilege
from the Federal government. This was
the exact system that Adam Smith denounced in TheWealth of Nations.

Being a political man, his policies
produced no wealth. He only moved the
rightful property of others to favored friends.

By contrast, Thomas Jefferson was a
producer. He ran a working plantation
which grew crops for trade as well domestic essentials such as meat and
vegetables for consumption. Other homespun
enterprises included a blacksmith shop a carpentry operation as well as
manufacturing facilities for textiles and nails. He was an architect, scientist, designer,
philosopher and writer.

As a disciple of John Locke,
Jefferson believed in the sovereignty of the individual and envisioned a
government whose functions would be limited to protecting and upholding each
individual’s God-given natural rights.

If Jefferson was the prototypical libertarian,
Hamilton may be regarded as the archetypal fascist, advancing an unholy
entanglement of state and private interests.
In fact, his Federalist Party went so far as to enact the Sedition
Act that made dissent with their policies illegal.

And herein lays the problem. Many modern writers hold up Hamilton as the
father of American capitalism and he was nothing of the sort. They mistake his brand cronyism as the model
for capitalist enterprise and rightfully turn away in disgust. This was the beef of the Occupy movement as
well as Tea Party populists.

Jefferson, on the other hand, was
guilty of the most heinous hypocrisy.
While he and other like minded Southerners advanced the causes of
individual self determination, limited government and states’ rights, they also
held slaves. Civil rights charlatans can
now cast words like “liberty”, “states’ rights” and “limited government” as
codes for rolling back the protections that they believe shelter them from
racial assaults.

Sadly, because of the Hamiltonian
tradition, most people misunderstand true free markets capitalism. To them Capitalism is a dirty word, an
insider’s game that is rigged so that all fail except for the privileged
few. Likewise, libertarian arguments for
limited government are oft perceived as thinly veiled racism. Minorities and their friends have mistakenly
come to view government as their protector rather than the plunderer that it
is.

It is incumbent upon activists in
the liberty movement to address these misconceptions, to debunk crony
capitalism and to reach out beyond our white male core if we are ever to arrest
the statist onslaught, let alone see liberty in our time.

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